Cultivating Plants

The sun shone fiercely golden on Asina, yet a more powerful star outshone it.

Aaliyah-al-Ydaz stood in the middle of the training grounds, hundreds surrounding her. Against such odds one would expect the sultanah to show some hesitation, – not fear, that was absolutely out of the question for someone of her caliber – some modicum doubt. 

But it was the opposite.

The ones surrounding the sultanah trembled. Their skin sweated, their arms trembled as they gripped hard on their weapons, and their feet became unstable as micromovements moved sand around.

They were legion, and yet, they weren’t fighting Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

She was fighting them.

No one dared to move, they were forced into an impasse of fear. The sultanah became more and more bored by their inaction, and they realized how that could be dangerous.

“I’m going to go light on the first that steps forward.” Aaliyah-al-Ydaz blessed them.

A temperamental and ruthless person she was, but not a liar. The single confirmation of her grace prompted one of the fighters to step up to the match as lighting.

Her face was covered in fear, but the words of forgiveness gave her strength. The young girl carried a dagger in each hand, their blades pointing downward like a predator’s fangs. She jumped forward with inhuman strength, a cloud of sand forming on her feed as she became a black blur.

Common soldiers, more bystanders of the test of strength than actual fighters, watched in confusion as they were unable to follow the girl’s movements.

The movements of the sultanzade.

The sultanah’s daughter shifted from place to place in small but fast jumps, forming a cloud of dust each time her feet touched the ground. It soon became apparent that it wasn’t a byproduct of her movement, but an intentional tactic.

And yet, for all her speed and subterfuge, it did not prove enough.

As the girl lunged for the blow, soldiers and servants were more than surprised to find the young imperial princess struggling still in the air after a single blink.

Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had grabbed her by her neck.

“U-ugh...” The young princess tried to talk, but her mother’s vicious grip impeded her from doing so.

“Next!” The sultanah shouted as she discarded her daughter throwing her randomly across the arena like a discarded rag.

A gesture that would have proven lethal to any other person, the sultanzade quickly recuperated from her dazed stated and twisted midair like a squirrel to reposition herself and land safely.

She was not unharmed though. The princess caressed her neck, still unable to talk, and had difficulty breathing. She was the fastest of the younger offspring but even her speed had proven not enough to face the empress of the desert. The sultanzade doubted she would be able to talk for the day.

That was what ‘going easy’ for the sultanah was.

The princess quickly hid in the shadows, thankful that she would no longer need to participate in combat.

For what was to come would be a massacre.

“I said next!” Aaliyah-al-Ydaz shouted and stomped her foot once on the ground.

The earth shook. Rifts in the arena formed from the seemingly inoffensive stomp.

The rest of the sultanzade attacked all at once.

“Are you alright?” Added a woman as she was looking at the fight. She looked at the defeated but lucky princess.

The girl tried to talk, but only a cough left her mouth. She swayed her head in defeat.

“As expected.” The woman shrugged and put her arms under her bosom. Not only highlighting her bountiful assets but also letting her shoulders rest.

The young princess looked at her with a hint of hate, not for her stern words, but for her lack of action. She knew the woman before her, she was but a carbon copy of the one who had just beaten her. 

Princess Rani, her half-sister.

The woman was barely older than her, five years at most, and whilst she was the most similar looking to the heavenly Aaliyah-al-Ydaz, she was but perhaps one of the weakest sultanzade. Her siblings had told her that her Nurture was lacking.

Shouldn’t you be fighting? The young princess looked at the older one with a look transmitting that exact emotion.

“Perhaps,” Rani added with an amused grin. “But we all know I wouldn’t be able to get close to Aaliyah.”

The girl skipped a heartbeat at the lack of respect and the familiarity directed at the sultanah. She hastily turned her head to the fight, fearing the sultanah may have heard her and she was out to get them.

Aaliyah-al-Ydaz fought like a maelstrom, the attacks coming from all directions impeding her from staying still. She jumped from place to place, evading the onslaught of incoming attacks. Not only the sultanah was fast as air itself, but with every sudden move she made, the air cracked. Defeated. 

Most sultanzade specialized in something. Whether it was in physical capabilities, martial arts, or special Nurture abilities. The myriad of sultanzade donned a myriad of weapons and fighting styles of their own, prohibited from being taught those of the imperial family and forced to learn their own.

Naila herself specialized in speed and a double dagger fighting style. Uncannily useful against normal people, or even assassins, but mostly useless against cultivators. They could either reinforce their senses to predict her or make their skin tough as stone to make her daggers useless.

Or if your name was Aaliyah-al-Ydaz, both. One had to train individual reinforcements to become competent in, each field of their own. And even then, you could only have one active at a time. In theory, that was. For the blitzing catastrophe tearing through her half-siblings didn’t play with the same rules.

The sultanah, unlike the sultanzade, didn’t specialize in any field.

She was competent in all of them.

And it showed.

Khalida and Kareem, the only twins on all of the sultanzade (even if they came from different fathers), approached the sultanah viciously. The female twin wielded a quarterstaff and focused on limiting Aaliyah-al-Ydaz’s movements, whilst the male twin used two scimitars with the undoubtful objective to decapitate the woman.

Aaliyah-al-Ydaz didn’t tolerate hesitation. Not even in training.

Yet they were instantly defeated.

The sultanah broke Khalida’s staff in two with a flick of her finger and as she turned to face Kareem, her hair was enough to get him. With her raw strength, a simple turn made her ponytail into a fierce whip. Much like the weapon, Aaliyah-al-Ydaz’s hair tore through the air, and the imperial prince was thrown around with a direct hit to the face.

Naila shrunk in pain upon hearing the impact on the man’s face. She was happy to have been the first blood. Knocked out in a fast but painless manner.

“See, completely useless.” Rani sighed at her side. “And I value my face, my looks are my weapon. Which talking about it, Kareem is probably going to need to wear a mask for a few weeks. Those wounds don’t heal easily, I have my... understanding with the whip.”

Going one by one, or two by two, obviously wasn’t the best tactic whilst fighting the scourge of the sands, so once the fight had kickstarted the adrenaline of the sultanzade, they all shot at once toward the sultanah.

The sultanzade were relentless, machines of pure violence as they assaulted their progenitor. They were obviously scared of fighting against the sultanah, death chance was non-zero, but the fact that they were allowed to hit her – or at least try so – without consequences motivated them with zealous fervor.

Naila had one of the tamest nurturing experiences with her mother, and even then, her blood boiled, her heart ecstatic at the thought of ravaging her neck open.

The youngest royals had no chance against Aaliyah-al-Ydaz. No matter how competent they may be in their fields, they only exceeded at one, if that. Naila was a genius among the youngest, and even then, she stood no better than the rest.

The only cultivators who had a chance of getting first blood were the oldest. Not only they had fought the sultanah far more times than any other but some of them had learned Nurture techniques.

And those were powerful.

Afar, one of the oldest princes, charged alongside his siblings. The man was already past forty, thrice as old as Naila, and yet he was nowhere close to matching Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

What made him different was his weapon choice: none.

Like the sultanah, Afar’s weapon was his own body. He started by punching the air a few meters away from Aaliyah-al-Ydaz, a gesture that would have been proven useless by a normal pugilist, to him it was a valuable technique.

Air deformed around Afar’s fist, the sheer power of his muscles sending ripples across the arena as he shot a wind blast toward the sultanah. The few clothes Aaliyah-al-Ydaz wore were threatened by the attack, but the person wearing them was immutable as a tree, deeply rooted in the ground.

But that wasn’t a Nurture technique.

No, that had just been a display of simple and ruthless strength. His siblings charged from all the other sides as he readied. Most were instantly repelled but the movements, especially those of the sultanah dispatching her half-sibling around, were almost too fast for Naila to follow.

She poured vitality into her senses, sound becoming crisper and her sight clearer. Naila felt the crevices of her mouth with uncanny detail, the air flowing between her hair strands, and the smell of sweat, dirt, and blood littering the arena.

I'll never get used to it.

Aaliyah-al-Ydaz was now serious.

Well... that is wrong. Mother is always serious, she said herself that lowering one’s guard is a fool’s errand. She’s just... taking them seriously in the fight.

Afar unleashed his ability.

From the princes’ fists, flames surged. The incandescent fire was nothing like the hearths Naila had seen. It was akin to the shine of the sun. A golden fire that purified everything along its path.

Until it collided with Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

It wasn’t that Afar’s fire was weak, it was one of the greatest techniques Naila had ever seen, but the sultanah was in a league of her own. Naila could sense the fire burning her nostrils even from tens of meters away.

Immovable as mountains, deadly as the desert, bountiful as a garden, gracious as a river.

All of that was Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

As the fire cleared, the figure of the sultanah shone unharmed. And then, Naila instantly closed her eyes.

Whilst the sultanah was unaffected by the scorching flames, her clothes were not. She didn’t close her eyes for respect of her sultanah, or mother, but for the woman’s charm. And she did not mean it in a literal sense, but a cultivator’s one.

The rest of the sultanzade, servants, soldiers, and any bystanders did the same.

Aaliyah-al-Ydaz charm was a powerful weapon, much like the rest of her body. Most of the time was inoffensive, though Naila had heard of some... shortcomings in the bathhouse. The sultanah kept women closer to her than men because most were partially resistant to her charms.

Emphasis on most.

But even then, all of this was in a normal scenario. One where Aaliyah-al-Ydaz wouldn’t be using vitality actively. But she was now in a fight, and her body was a destroying maelstrom of vitality.

Her natural charms were, quite enough, able to infatuate anyone. Horror stories of people whose enchantment never disappeared lingered through the palace, people whose mind was only filled with the concept of Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

And those charms were especially effective if she were naked.

Which she was.

The thoughts of Aaliyah-al-Ydaz’s hidden bits of bronze skin filled her mind. She had just seen a blur of them for a millisecond. But the thought endured.

Naila couldn’t deny she was a bit tempted to look.

To check if the rumors were true.

To see how magnific-

“Ugh...” A sigh at her side interrupted her thoughts, clearing her faltering mind.

It came from Princess Rani, and before Naila had enough time to process what was happening, she heard the woman’s steps on the ground, and from the corner of her eye saw how she assaulted a maid that turned her back from the sultanah.

“Kya!” The maid yelped as the princess stripped her of her clothes with a single pull.

The maid did not dare to turn her back nor protest.

“You should work on your modesty, Aaliyah.” Rani heretically told to the sultanah.

Naila heard the sound of clothing brushing against the air. It was obvious what the sultanzade had done. And whilst she was both scared and offended by Rani’s tone, Naila couldn’t help but think how she was immune from the powerful charms.

“Ah, you are a lifesaver, Rani,” Aaliyah-al-Ydaz responded amicably, unfazed by her daughter’s disrespect. “But you should have joined your siblings. You are never going to nurture yourself if you don’t practice.”

“It’s not going to make much difference, is it?” The light-handed nature of women’s voices surprised Naila. They didn’t seem like mother and daughter, but lifelong friends. Friends with a lot of venom in their tone, but friends, nonetheless. “My abilities fall elsewhere.”

“That’s right.” The sultanah admitted, sounds of the torn clothes grazing her skin graced Naila’s ears. “Your innate charm is second to me, I wonder where you got that?” 

Mother joked? Naila couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The sultanah was a paragon of violence, sexuality, and excellence. She had never seen Aaliyah-al-Ydaz joke. Even if it was a jest as slight as this one.

“Your talents as a cultivator, shameful as they are, aren’t without their merits.” Naila heard the sultanah take a step forward, her bare feet displacing the sand on the ground. “Come, you and I have a lot to talk about. As for the rest, you can already look. Cowards!” The sultanah shouted. “Decent warm-up, but you all still have a lot before you!”

Even if she taunted everyone like that, she was the most conscious about her situation. Her charms could lead anyone to madness, even her own descendants, to assault her. Of course, no one would succeed, but it wasn’t madness for anything. Once you were charmed, logic failed.

Naila opened her eyes and gazed upon the two women, still flabbergasted by her half-sister’s ability to survive the charms, and her eyes only made her redden.

Princess Rani and Sultanah Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

The two women had shining bronze skin and radiant amethyst eyes. It was obvious that they were daughter and mother. Their differences, however, didn’t lay on age. Aaliyah-al-Ydaz, thanks to her perfect cultivation and Nurture abilities, looked as young if not younger than Rani.

The differences between the two were in their constitution.

Aaliyah-al-Ydaz was tall, strong woman. At a towering two-meter high, covered in powerful and delicious muscles, she was the symbol of the strength of the Sultanate.

Rani was the incarnation of what an imperial princess should look like. Tall, but not much. Curvaceous, yet with breasts not as obscenely big as her mother’s. Made up, but not a lot (yet with infinitely more make-up than the sultanah as she was all au nature). And above all else, seductive.

As the two most beautiful women in the arena walked past her, Naila couldn’t help but land her eyes on Aaliyah-al-Ydaz’s marked abs.

There's still a lot of work left to do. Naila thought with a mixture of shame and excitement as she caressed her belly button. She had muscles, especially a lot of them for an underage girl, but not enough to be a menace. 

I need to nurture myself more. The sultanzade gripped her two daggers with the intent to kill.